OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JANUARY 10, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
Brown’s priorities
take steps toward
unity, bipartianship
G
ov. Kate Brown outlined three priorities in her inaugural
speech Monday, which — if she and the 2017 Legislature
achieve them — could dramatically improve Oregon:
• Create more and better jobs in rural Oregon.
• Expand health insurance so all Oregon children are covered.
• Improve Oregon’s dismal rate of high school graduation.
Brown’s nearly two-year tenure as governor has been a decid-
edly mixed record, pleasing to liberal and urban Oregonians and
frustrating to conservative and rural residents. Monday’s speech
could be a welcome turning point for Brown, a Democrat, who
now is an elected governor instead of an appointed one. Her
speech was bipartisan, pragmatic and focused, avoiding her pen-
chant for pursuing dozens of ideas.
Much of urban Oregon has recovered well from the recession.
As Brown put it, “For those living in urban Oregon, it seems like
the economy is growing like a gangly teenage boy: overnight and
out of control.
“For the first time in almost two decades, the statewide unem-
ployment rate dropped below the national average. News outlets
from Forbes to Fortune to Bloomberg are writing glowing profiles
of Oregon’s job-producing economy.”
Yet, she said, “there is a disturbing gap between the unemploy-
ment rate in urban Oregon and rural Oregon.”
One antidote is the Oregon Manufacturing Innovation Center,
which is being developed in Scappoose, thanks to the determina-
tion of state Sen. Betsy Johnson. Twelve large manufacturers have
made commitments to the center. Some are interested in opening
their own facilities in Scappoose.
But Brown also sees other opportunities for rural economic
development, starting with preparing for the Big One.
At least 100 coastal bridges would be destroyed or severely
damaged in that inevitable major earthquake. Seismic retrofitting
of coastal bridges and roads would create good, family-wage jobs.
So too would improving U.S. 97, which would become the state’s
major north-south arterial when the big quake makes Interstate 5
impassable.
Brown also spoke of the importance of water projects for agri-
culture, such as in the Umatilla Basin, and of increased timber har-
vests on U.S. Forest Service land.
All these projects make sense — if the governor and
Legislature will follow through.
“By leveraging the human, material and natural resources that
once made our rural communities the most prosperous in the state,
we have a real chance to tackle the economic fault line that has
split our state in two,” Brown said.
There is a side benefit as well, one that Brown did not dwell on.
More jobs and better-paying ones mean more tax revenue for the
state, not just economic improvement for families and communities.
State government and schools face a projected $1.7 billion defi-
cit in 2017-19 — if all programs were to be maintained at their
current level. The biggest challenge facing this year’s Legislature
is to balance that state budget, including paying for health care and
education.
A healthy economy throughout rural Oregon would be a bless-
ing for the entire state.
The governor’s full speech can be found at http://www.oregon.gov/gov/
media/Pages/speeches/Inaugural-010917.aspx
How Trump is erasing Obama
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times News Service
F
or a soon-to-be nowhere
man, he’s everywhere. Sens-
ing “time’s winged chariot
hurrying near,” as the poet had it,
President Barack
Obama is using
every hour left in
his presidency to
ensure that Don-
ald Trump will not
erase it all.
It’s one part vanity project. What
president doesn’t want to put a dent
in history? One man freed 4 million
slaves. Another created national
parks and forests that left every
American a rich inheritance of pub-
lic land. A third crushed the Nazis
— from a wheelchair, while dying.
And Obama? He bequeaths the
incoming president “the longest
economic expansion and monthly
job creation in history,” as my col-
league Andrew Ross Sorkin noted.
Trump, the pumpkin-haired rooster
taking credit for the dawn, has
already tried to seize a bit of that
achievement as his own. Thanks,
Obama. But he’s also likely to
screw it up, perhaps by a trade war,
or a budget-busting tax cut.
Already, Trump has flirted with
treason, flouted conflict-of-interest
rules, bullied dissidents and blown
off the advice of seasoned public
servants. He has yet to hold a news
conference since winning the elec-
tion. And did another day just pass
without a word of the promise to
“reveal things that other people
don’t know” about Russian inter-
ference with our election? Maybe
he’s waiting for more whispers in
his ear from the Kremlin.
Farewell address
In advance of his farewell
address this week, the presi-
dent has tried to Trump-proof
a climate pact that commits the
world’s second-leading producer
of earth-warming pollutants — the
United States — to making this lit-
tle orb of ours a less perilous place
for Sasha’s and Malia’s and Ivan-
ka’s kids. Trump has promised to
go rogue on the planet, as quickly
as he can.
Until Day 1, Trump is just a
70-year-old man with a twitchy
Twitter account. But on Jan. 20,
he becomes what Grover Norquist
wished for in a pliantly conserva-
tive president: “A Republican with
enough working digits to handle a
pen.”
With that pen, the new presi-
dent can take health care from 20
million Americans, free Wall Street
to once again wildly speculate and
smash things up for the rest of us,
and require schools to let people
carry guns into classrooms — all
campaign promises.
Make America Sick Again is
the slogan floated by Sen. Chuck
Schumer, who is much better at
messaging a negative than Obama
ever was at messaging a positive.
The people who stand to lose most
are Trump supporters. The Afford-
able Care Act has saved countless
lives in red states, and slowed med-
ical costs. So why toss it, without a
plan to replace it? To spite the guy
on the way out.
Most of the
Trump agenda
... is opposed
by clear
majorities.
Trump will
erase Obama’s
policy legacy
at his peril.
The intent of Republicans,
poised to push through the most
far-reaching conservative agenda
in nearly a hundred years, is to act
as if Obama never existed — the
George Bailey of presidents. It
won’t take long for Bedford Falls
to become Pottersville.
Trump will cut taxes on the rich,
and for those born on third base,
eliminate an estate tax that was one
of Teddy Roosevelt’s solutions to
inequality. He may try to defund
Planned Parenthood — for many
poor women, the only chance to
catch cancer early. He may deport
Dreamers, more than 740,000
young people who have been
allowed to obtain temporary work
permits and avoid being thrown out
of the country under Obama.
Every order
On his first day in office, Trump
will “repeal every single Obama
executive order.” That’s the prom-
ise of Vice President-elect Mike
Pence. Obama issued just under
270 executive orders, well below
the number proclaimed by Ron-
ald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower,
Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt
and even that conservative paragon,
Silent Cal Coolidge.
A significant Obama order pro-
tected gays in the government con-
tracting system from discrimina-
tion. Another prohibited federal
employees from texting while driv-
ing. There were sanctions against
criminals, mobsters and other inter-
national monsters, and upgrades
in pay for federal employees who
earned less than their private sector
counterparts.
And get this: Repealing “every
single Obama executive order”
would require Trump to dump
four edicts that allowed federal
workers to leave early on Christ-
mas Eve. The War on Christmas
heavy breathers at Fox News, who
recently declared said conflict dead
and won for St. Nick’s side, will
surely be outraged. Not.
Obama leaves office with his
highest job approval ratings in
four years. Most Americans like
him and his policies. Trump will
enter office with the lowest transi-
tion approval ratings of any presi-
dent-elect in nearly a quarter-cen-
tury. About half of all Americans
don’t like him, and of course, he
got nearly 3 million fewer votes
than Hillary Clinton.
Most of the Trump agenda —
building a wall, cutting taxes on the
rich, ramping up oil and gas drill-
ing at the expense of alternative
fuels, taking away people’s health
care — is opposed by clear majori-
ties. Trump will erase Obama’s pol-
icy legacy at his peril.
What he cannot do is erase the
mark of the man — a measured
and rational president, a committed
father and husband, who is leaving
his country much better off, and the
office without a trace of personal
scandal.
Deficits matter again at a time they can do most harm
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
N
ot long ago prominent Repub-
licans like Paul Ryan, the
speaker of the House, liked
to warn in apocalyptic terms about
the dangers of bud-
get deficits, declar-
ing that a Greek-
style crisis was just
around the cor-
ner. But now, sud-
denly, those very
same politicians are perfectly happy
with the prospect of deficits swol-
len by tax cuts; the budget resolution
they’re considering would, according
to their own estimates, add $9 trillion
in debt over the next decade. Hey, no
problem.
This sudden turnaround comes as
a huge shock to absolutely nobody —
at least nobody with any sense. All
that posturing about the deficit was
obvious flimflam, whose purpose was
to hobble a Democratic president,
and it was completely predictable that
the pretense of being fiscally respon-
sible would be dropped as soon as the
GOP regained the White House.
What wasn’t quite so predictable,
however, was that Republicans would
stop pretending to care about deficits
at almost precisely the moment that
deficits were starting to matter again.
Those apocalyptic warnings are
still foolish: America, which borrows
in its own currency and therefore
can’t run out of cash, isn’t at all like
Greece. But running big deficits is no
longer harmless, let alone desirable.
Eight years ago
The way it was: Eight years ago,
with the economy in free fall, I wrote
that we had entered an era of “depres-
sion economics,” in which the usual
rules of economic policy no lon-
ger applied, in which virtue was vice
and prudence was folly. In particu-
lar, deficit spending was essential to
support the economy, and attempts
to balance the budget would be
destructive.
This diagnosis — shared by
most professional economists —
didn’t come out of thin air; it was
based on well-established macro-
economic principles. Furthermore,
the predictions that came out of
those principles held up very well.
In the depressed economy that pre-
vailed for years after the financial
crisis, government borrowing didn’t
drive up interest rates, money cre-
ation by the Fed didn’t cause infla-
tion, and nations that tried to slash
budget deficits experienced severe
recessions.
But these predictions were always
conditional, applying only to an
economy far from full employment.
That was the kind of economy Pres-
ident Barack Obama inherited; but
the Trump-Putin administration will,
instead, come into power at a time
when full employment has been more
or less restored.
How do we know that we’re close
to full employment? The low official
unemployment rate is just one indi-
cator. What I find more compelling
are two facts: Wages are finally rising
reasonably fast, showing that work-
ers have bargaining power again, and
the rate at which workers are quitting
their jobs, an indication of how con-
fident they are of finding new jobs, is
back to pre-crisis levels.
What changes once we’re close to
full employment? Basically, govern-
ment borrowing once again competes
with the private sector for a limited
amount of money. This means that
deficit spending no longer provides
much if any economic boost, because
it drives up interest rates and “crowds
out” private investment.
Now, government borrowing can
still be justified if it serves an import-
ant purpose: Interest rates are still
very low, and borrowing at those low
rates to invest in much-needed infra-
structure is still a very good idea,
both because it would raise produc-
tivity and because it would provide a
bit of insurance against future down-
turns. But while candidate Trump
talked about increasing public invest-
ment, there’s no sign at all that con-
gressional Republicans are going to
make such investment a priority.
Cutting taxes
No, they’re going to blow up the
deficit mainly by cutting taxes on the
wealthy. And that won’t do anything
significant to boost the economy or
create jobs. In fact, by crowding out
investment it will somewhat reduce
long-term economic growth. Mean-
while, it will make the rich richer,
even as cuts in social spending make
the poor poorer and undermine secu-
rity for the middle class. But that, of
course, is the intention.
Again, none of this implies an
economic catastrophe. If such a
catastrophe does come, it will be
thanks to other policies, like a roll-
back of financial regulation, or from
outside events like a crisis in China
or Europe. And because stuff does
happen, and a lot depends on how
the U.S. government responds when
it does, we should be concerned that
the incoming administration only
seems to take economic advice from
people who have consistently been
wrong about, well, everything.
But back to deficits: the crucial
point is not that Republicans were
hypocritical. It is, instead, that their
hypocrisy made us poorer. They
screamed about the evils of debt at a
time when bigger deficits would have
done a lot of good, and are about to
blow up deficits at a time when they
will do harm.